


Of Magic and Loss

by esteoflorien



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-08
Updated: 2017-04-08
Packaged: 2018-10-16 11:23:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,814
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10570299
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/esteoflorien/pseuds/esteoflorien
Summary: Cassiopeia Black has lived a full life in the Muggle world, but now, in wartime, magic draws her back to a wizarding world that has left her behind. This is a sequel to Poseidon's Prisoner (http://archiveofourown.org/works/3821470), which was a 2015 Rarely Written gift fic for Alley_Skywalker. That fic explains much of the backstory to this one, so it's probably a good idea to read that first.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Gehayi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gehayi/gifts).



> Thanks to Gehayi for the wonderful prompt - it was lovely to revisit these characters. Hope you enjoy the story!
> 
> This story fictionalizes some historical individuals to better situate and contextualize Cassiopeia's forays in the Muggle world by allowing Cassiopeia to peripherally interact with them. Of course, this story is entirely fictional and purely for enjoyment, but I'd highly recommend doing some research into their lives. Background research was one of the real pleasures of writing this piece and Poseidon's Prisoner, even if the bulk of it wasn't really relevant to the story.

It has been so long since she took her first tentative steps in Muggle London that she can hardly recall the temerity they required. For Muggle London is home, now: home, with its smoke and sound; home, with its bustling shops and manicured gardens; home, with its non-magical folk and its magical old streets. She remembers the first time she stepped onto the pavement, just outside Diagon Alley, when the automobiles seemed to whizz past, kicking up dust and spewing exhaust. She hadn’t really articulated what it was she’d expected of Muggle London, but she certainly hadn’t thought to find something modern and changing. She had returned to the Leaky Cauldron feeling very much as if she had left a great deal behind, as if there was a whole world on the other side of those bricks that would go on turning and turning, spinning round into something entirely new while everything in her world would stay the same. 

“Madam,” the vicar says, nodding. She returns his greeting, and finds a seat in a pew, towards the back, as is her wont when she attends services, which is rare, these days. When her husband was alive, she’d adopted his customs as her own, raising their sons in the Church of England, sending them off to fight for a flag she hadn’t always called her own, and seeing them return draped in it. That was something unique to the Muggles, she’d always thought - this idea of country, of uniting under one flag. She’d never felt British until the day Alistair slipped the gold band on her finger, and his house became her house, with its portrait of the King on the wall. Certainly at Hogwarts there had been a vague sense of their being British, of being distinct in some fundamental way from the other wizarding schools and their respective nations, but the kind of Englishness she now felt was something she’d only observed among her Muggle-born classmates. 

She wonders idly if any of those classmates would recognize her if they passed her on the street today. It has been a very long time since she last tapped her wand on the wall behind the Leaky Cauldron. At first she had returned every so often to visit her siblings and the friends who remained after her marriage, but with each visit, she became increasingly aware of how different she was becoming, how large the distance between them was growing, and she had eventually simply stopped. And when days turned to weeks to months to years without comment, she was inclined to think they’d never even noticed her absence at all. 

After the boys had grown, she’d often wondered why they’d been squibs. Why, how, when there were plenty of Muggle-born wizards, and she was _so very talented_. Of course, it had been easier that way. Easier in may ways, truly, but still a disappointment. Marius was of the mind that it had been her greatest spell: to spare her children from a life in the Noble House of Black, she’d willed them into squibs. _But if they had not been_ , she has often said to herself, never to Alistair, _might they not have perished in France_. It is never a question, always a statement.

At the foot of the altar, a group of older women adjust grand bouquets of white lilies, muttering back and forth to each other. The social life of the church had been something to which she’d needed to acclimate herself, shortly after her marriage when she realized that there was precious little in a country town to engage the wife of a well-respected doctor apart from charity and church. At first she’d been unable to imagine herself as one of them, flitting about arranging flowers and jumble sales, but soon enough, she’d slipped into the cadence of that life.

( _Don’t you miss it_ , Marius would say, from time to time, and she did. Of course she did. She missed it more than she could possibly describe. And yet, faced with Alistair and Robbie and Dennis, she couldn’t possibly imagine anything other than the life they lived.) 

Commotion in the aisle draws her out of her reverie. _So that’s Wissie_ , she thinks to herself, watching a small, somber woman take her place in the front row. Her face is hidden behind a veiled hat that perhaps seems larger than it is from Cassiopeia’s vantage point. It has been a long time since they saw each other, and theirs had always been a peripheral acquaintance. 

 _(She guarded Nancy’s calling card as if it were a life raft, with Marius’s words always in the back of her mind,_ you’re certainly making the right friends _, even if she and Nancy were never friends at all. Now, she recognized Nancy’s kindness and continued interest for what they were, without pretense of friendship or maternal love. Excepting that first night, when the edges of Nancy’s card were still crisp and the memory still fresh in her mind, Cassiopeia had never entertained the fantasy that Nancy might be anything more than a fine lady concerned for a lost little girl.)_

She waits on the receiving line like everyone else, and when she reaches Wissie, she can tell that she doesn’t recognize her. 

“Your mother helped me find my way,” she settles for saying, for that much is true, and she’ll make peace with Nancy and the rest in her own way. Wissie nods, murmurs her acknowledgment, and soon enough, Cassiopeia is on her way. 

The air is heavy with the scent of flowers, and despite the sunshine, Cassiopeia thinks it might rain. 

~

When she reads of Wissie’s passing, some ten years after her mother’s, it’s as if a door has shut on that part of her life. 

She thinks, for a fleeting moment, of returning to the wizarding world. It would be just the kind of thing Cassiopeia Black would do: reclaim her place as matriarch of the family and reassert her magical talents. But the name feels funny to her now: she has been Cassandra for so very long. 

( _The first time she’d said it had been the day she’d met Wissie, when Nancy had introduced them and she had interrupted her. She hadn’t wanted to be so different, and a name like Cassiopeia Black was_ different. 

_“Darling, this is Cass-“_

_“Cassandra,” Cassiopeia supplied. “Cassandra.”_

_It had been the first time she’d said her new name aloud. Nancy looked at her oddly that afternoon, and once they’d finished their tea, and Wissie had been dismissed, she’d cornered her about it._

_“Why on earth didn’t you tell Wissie your real name?”_

_For a fine lady Nancy didn’t have a fine voice, and the harshness of her tone gave her question an edge._

_“Because I don’t think I want to be Cassiopeia anymore,” she’d replied, immediately, for it was the truth and this, if anything, was an instance where it was vitally important to avoid prevarication. “You told me that Queen Cassiopeia can escape, that she goes dancing. Well. I want to dance.”_

_Nancy had looked at her then, really looked at her, her mouth set in a tight line. “Very well,” she’d said, in her usual clipped tone. “Miss Cassandra Black. I suppose.”_

_A few months later, just after she’d passed her NEWTs, with the prospect of life after Hogwarts looming large, Nancy sent a letter inviting Miss Cassandra Black to tea. And it was then that she was introduced to Alistair. By the end of the summer, it was as if she’d never been Cassiopeia Black at all.)_

From time to time, it’s Marius who mentions it - _haven’t you thought of going back?_ \- but she knows he says it out of a sense of duty, of lingering guilt for having given her a reason to leave everything she knew. _But it’s not you, it was Alistair,_ she says, because it’s easier to answer what he’s left unsaid, rather than what he asked.

It occurs to her that Alistair never knew her real name. 

~

When Alistair passes on, she doesn’t know how to bear the silence of his absence. This house, their house, is a Muggle house - the wards surround it, but they don’t run through it. Even the house is silent. For several months she does what she must and what she always did: she does the washing on Mondays, the shops on Tuesdays and Thursdays, sits to tea with the ladies on Wednesdays, cleans on Saturdays, and attends church on Sundays. She fills her days with the multitude of things that simply must get done. When she is busy, there’s no time for missing him. 

“He’s fading away from me,” she tells the ladies of her set, one Wednesday at teatime. They are gathered round the fireplace in Edith Brown’s parlor, which she has just redecorated with shaggy carpet and beaded curtains. Cassiopeia finds it very American, and says as much, which Edith fortunately takes to be a compliment. 

“It’s the way of things, my dear,” old Mrs. Parker says, nodding her silvered head in agreement with herself. She pats Cassiopeia’s hand. “Eventually we’re all just threads in the tapestry of life.” The others nod sagely, but Cassiopeia can only think of the tapestry at the manor, the one where, beside her own name and portrait, Marius’s had been crudely burnt away. It horrifies her in a way it never did before. There is magic that she longs for, and magic she abhors, and it has seemed, through the course of her life, that it is easiest to simply reject it all, summarily, rather than sort it out. She is a Ravenclaw, after all: bright, but not brave. She knows why she was Sorted as she was. 

After some time, Alistair no longer visits her in her dreams, and it is then that she feels the tug of her magic for the first time in a good long while. It’s a little thing, she thinks, to fetch the locked trunk where she keeps her books and her supplies and her wand and, wrapped in silk and long forgotten, the small jeweled pensieve, a gift from grandfather Black on her coming-of-age. He’d scored the runes himself and had it set with amethysts, her birthstone, and diamonds. It had been such an extraordinary gift that she hadn’t known what to say beyond _thank you_ and not two weeks later, she’d carefully stowed it in her trunk and slipped out into the night, running away towards Alistair, towards their future. 

She takes to reliving their life, memory by memory, day after day. In the silvery swirls of her memories, Alistair is alive and she is young, and it’s so seductively easy to lose herself in these moving pictures of her life that she sometimes forgets that they’re memories at all. And one afternoon, the sight of the mist rising from the pensieve jolts her into reality; she recognizes these ghosts for what they are. 

She stores the pensieve, resolving to seek it only when truly necessary, and leaves her wand on the mantel. At first she barely notices it, but then she reaches for it more and more, without even thinking about it. At the close of the month, she finds that she’s carrying it with her much as she did at Hogwarts. By the end of summer, when she leaves the house without it, she’s acutely aware of its lack.

_(When she was eleven, peeking around towers of musty boxes at Ollivander’s, she hadn’t stopped to think that she was buying something that she’d always carry with her. And after all, as her father had already said twice to old Mr. Ollivander, it wasn’t as if she need a wand to work magic anyway, because she didn’t. Perhaps because of this, she was unconcerned when the first wand sent sparks through the roof, and the second rattled floorboards, and the third and fourth and fifth caused similar destruction._

_“Yes well,” Ollivander said, profferring yet another box. She took it as carefully as all the others, half-expecting it to vibrate just as violently as the last. Instead, it rested comfortably in her hand._

_“This is a pretty color of wood,” she said, and it was the first thing, apart from “I’m sorry!” that she’d said to Ollivander at all. It was the first thing that came to mind, but was hardly the first - or best - observation could make about the wand. She didn’t know how to describe it._

_“Tergeo,” she whispered, pointing it at the mound of dust which she had disturbed with the first five wands she’d tried. To her delight, the dust disappeared in a cheery little cloud. She felt her magic flow evenly through the wand, focusing more precisely on the dust pile than she could have on her own. The handle felt comfortably smooth in her hand, without any distracting carvings, although she could see a pretty pattern of burnished leaves winding its way round._

“ _Beech,” Ollivander supplied. “And unicorn hair.”_

_“Unusual, is it not?” her father asked. He was looking out the window, and Cassiopeia rather thought he hadn’t seen the wand at all._

_“Wands choose the witch,” Ollivander replied, even though it wasn’t an answer at all. “It seems to me as if Miss Cassiopeia has her wand.”)_

She has heard, via Marius who stays abreast of such things through his friendships with other squibs, of the war that is ravaging the wizarding world. She knows which side the ancient and most noble house of Black will take; she finds herself grateful for having escaped when she did. _It would do no harm to practice,_ she tells herself, and so she does: she reminds herself how to apparate; she reinforces the wards.

She doesn’t know how likely it is that the war will follow her to her home, but she begins to watch over the neighborhood nevertheless, walking the streets like a prefect patrolling the hallways of Hogwarts. It isn’t much, but it feels like her duty, her small act of service to the unseen war raging in a world she’s left behind. 

~

Diagon Alley looks unchanged from her memory when she steps through from the Leaky Cauldron for the first time in decades. No one pays her any mind as she meanders through, glancing into the shops without specific interest. She knows she doesn’t look especially wizarding now; she looks like the respectable Muggle woman that she, for better or for worse, has been for the better part of sixty years. But no matter, it seems: there are plenty of children running about in denim jeans and jumpers, and plenty of fully grown witches wearing only the barest concession to wizarding robes, if that at all. If she didn’t know better, she’d think that some of these dresses had come straight off the racks at Selfridge’s. 

She has a particular mission, today: to fetch some valuables from the vault that she’s fairly certain still exists in her name at Gringotts. If the wizarding world is once again on the precipice of tearing itself apart over Muggleborns and Squibs, there are some bits and bobs she’d quite like to have before they destroy it all, and the money, if there is money, well, that wouldn’t be so bad either. Even if the family thinks she may as well be dead, the goblins won’t care who she is so long as she’s got her key. 

Sure enough, the goblins pay her no mind, and in short order, a surprisingly even-tempered one has delivered her promptly to the vault.

She hadn’t really given much thought to her Gringotts vault in a good long while, long enough that she didn’t have much faith that anything would be in there at all. Not that there had ever been very much in there, really: just a small amount of money, once she’d become a prefect, ostensibly because she could manage her own finances when the need arose. She’d taken to leaving some things in her vault then, too; things from Hogwarts that she didn’t trust bringing home, but couldn’t be bothered carrying with her. 

In the far corner is her Hogwarts trunk, dusty and, by all appearances, still locked. A small pile of galleons sits nearby. The goblin waits patiently in his little cart as she shrinks it down and pockets it away. 

( _Is that us when we were children_ , Marius says, the next time he comes to call, peering at the wizarding photograph newly placed on the mantel. _How funny._ )

~

One evening, the fireplace bursts into life, and it’s all she can do to grab her wand and stand at the ready. A litany of spells ruin through her head - _protego expelliarmus stupefy_ \- but for the first time, she falters in her confidence. A shaggy-haired, wild-looking man appears in the flames; there’s something unsettling about his face, something haunting his eyes. He looks vaguely like a vagabond Arcturus, which does little to reassure her: the fireplace has never been, at least to her knowledge, on the Floo network. 

“Aunt Cassiopeia,” he intones, the sound filling the room although he’s hardly speaking above a whisper. “I am Sirius Black.” Her confusion must show, because he purses his lips and adds, “the third.” 

“Hello, nephew,” she says, because what else is there to say? She doesn’t know why she’s so surprised that _dead to this family_ doesn’t actually translate to _dead_ , and moreover, why she hadn’t ever considered it before. It would have done no good to worry over it, she supposed. If her father had really wanted to take his pound of flesh, he’d have done it long ago, and on something that mattered more to her than her own self. And now, with all those who mattered most lost to her, nothing matters nearly so much anymore.

“There is no time for pleasantries,” he says. “I understand you went to Gringotts.” 

“I accessed my vault, yes, as is my right,” she replies, careful to keep her voice measured. If this boy is anything like Arcturus, she would do well to keep in control of the conversation. 

“You must avoid Gringotts for the time being,” Sirius says. “In fact, avoid the wizarding world entirely. Have you got enough to get by?” 

“I don’t understand - “ 

When he interrupts, his voice is sharp-edged and steely. “We are at _war_ , Aunt Cassiopeia. You have been absent from our world for decades. They do not expect you to be alive. The tapestry thought you were dead, up until very recently. And the Black family is on the wrong side of this war. Stay away from Diagon Alley. I came to warn you, because I can’t do much anything else at the moment.” 

“I’m not surprised we’re on the wrong side.”

“I don’t suppose you would be,” Sirius says, his voice slightly more gentle. “Why did you leave, anyway?” 

There are echoes of Arcturus in him, echoes she can readily see and hear. 

 _Because I fell in love_ is not what one says to one’s unknown nephew, and moreover, it’s not the whole story. “Because I couldn’t stay,” she settles for saying, and it’s as close to the truth as she’s ever gotten. 

“You’re not the only one of us to feel that way,” Sirius says. “I need to go.” 

“I will stay away from Diagon Alley,” she concedes. 

“I’ve told exactly two people that you’re alive,” he continues, almost as if he didn’t hear her. “Professor Dumbledore from Hogwarts knows, and so does Andromeda, your niece. She married a Muggle-born wizard, but she stayed, despite it all. I think she might pay you a visit.” 

With that, he disappears, the fire extinguishing and breaking the spell. To her embarrassment, the silence hangs heavy in the room. She sleeps with the electric lights ablaze and her wand by her bed, and dreams of Alistair, and the boys, and of long-ago days that no magic can resurrect. In the morning, she wonders if she will know when the war ends. 

When the owl arrives, sent from a niece who lives not so far away, but whom she’s never met, she goes to the shops. She buys a Muggle greeting card for her, _a deepest expression of sympathy_ , because she likes the verse and because it’s Muggle, and because if she were Andromeda, who married a Muggle-born wizard and raised a daughter who died saving the same wizarding world that murdered her father, well, perhaps she might like an ordinary, plain, non-magical card too. 

She goes to Diagon Alley; she buys the _Prophet_. Some weeks later, she meets Andromeda for tea, and little Teddy, who clings to her robes, so resembles Dennis she thinks she might cry.

~

The chime at the door startles her. 

On the other side is a slight little thing, a girl with a wild mass of curly hair, looking for all the world as if Cassiopeia ought to have expected her. They stare at each other in silence.  

“I’m - “ 

“Yes,” Cassiopeia interrupts, looking the girl up and down. “I know who you are. You’re the brightest witch of your age.” It wouldn’t do to allow her to speak her name aloud. She knows precious little of what’s happened in the magical world, but she knows enough to know that this little girl was at the heart of a swirling maelstrom, and she knows that even the trees have ears, even here, tucked away on her estate. She is older than she looks; her eyes betray something of what she has endured. The sun tints her hair red; the curls whip around her face, and she pointedly, impatiently, tosses them back. She wears a pea coat and a jumper and jeans, and sensible shoes, and there’s nothing at all remarkable about the appearance of this small person in her entryway. And yet Cassiopeia knows that this is perhaps the most important little girl in the world. 

“So were you,” the girl says, matter-of-factly, wedging her foot between the door and the frame, as if she expects Cassiopeia will close it, as if her foot will make any sort of difference. “So were you. So. Why are you here?”

In her mind’s eye, she calls the wards protecting the house. They glow gold around the perimeter, a perfect web of powerful magic, a last gift from the grandfather who had wept when she’d gone away. Perhaps, in the end, we show love in the ways we can, and perhaps this was his way. Perhaps that’s what’s important: the magic that courses round her house, not the years of estranged silence; the magic that suffuses her whole being even when she turned her back on it, not the burned-away names on the family tree at the Grimmauld Place townhouse. 

“Come in, little girl,” she says, and after a moment of hesitation, Hermione Granger does. 

 


End file.
